Samir Shukla
By Samir Shukla
The Golden Road – How Ancient India Transformed the World
Author: William Dalrymple
(Bloomsbury)
Historian William Dalrymple lays out a road map documenting how India influenced the ancient world via trade and cultural exchange. The peoples of India spread its cultural influence widely from Romans to Southeast Asia. He calls this “road” that spread this influence, The Golden Road, demarcating from the Chinese influenced Silk Road. He maps out India’s unrecognized or underrecognized role in the world.
This book lays bare colonial notions that India didn’t do much to influence the world.
Dalrymple writes, “For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilization, creating around it a vast empire of ideas, Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics, and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific.”
The list seems endless, from mathematics to astronomy, to gorgeous Buddhist sculptures and monuments, Hindu merchants from Gujarat and South India, and a plethora of Indian goods influenced ancient world.
Black pepper, perfumes and aromatics, precious stones, gems and metals, and of course the teachings of the Buddha spread far and wide outside of India.
Dalrymple writes, “The implications of the unprecedented scale of sea trade between India and Rome from the first century onwards are enormous. It is now clear that historians have been looking at entirely the wrong place when they thought about ancient trade routes. It was India, not China, that was the greatest trading partner with the Roman Empire.”
The Buddhist influence along with the spread of Hinduism in ancient times is documented in a sweeping narrative, a history book that reads like a collection of intriguing short stories.
Samir Shukla is the Editor of Saathee Magazine
Contact: samir@saathee.com
X: @ShuklaWrites
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